She nodded and grabbed Hale by his good arm, hauling him to his feet. “I’m fine. But Hale’s not behind the bomb. Did you find Claire?”
“Yeah,” Jack said, clearly winded from his mad dash to get to her. “Let’s go.”
Maddie followed him at a jog, dragging Hale along with them as they made their way down the hall to the stairwell. Jack opened the door and cleared it before they entered and scrambled down the stairs.
They were about halfway down when Maddie suddenly heard Finn’s voice in her ear. She stopped short, pressing her fingertips to the device to try to hear better.
“Jack, hold on,” she called. “Did you catch that?”
He shook his head, frowning as he pressed his ear, straining to catch Finn’s garbled transmissions. “Keep moving.”
A few minutes later they hit the final landing, but just as they slipped out of the stairwell toward the exit, Jack suddenly slid to a halt, throwing out his arm and nearly clotheslining Maddie and Hale.
He held a finger to his lips and jerked his chin. Maddie frowned and turned her attention to the open area of the rotunda. Standing to one side of the escalator that went down to the lower level, a group of perhaps a dozen people stood in a tightly spaced cluster, facing outward. Maddie could see some of them were crying, others looked terrified and on the verge of bolting in fear, but something was keeping them there.
Then Maddie noticed the SWAT officers spaced out behind furniture, a couple of them on the balconies overlooking the floor below. A bald man in a ballistics vest slowly inched toward the group. He was talking, but Maddie couldn’t quite make out what he was saying at that distance. But the reality of the situation was clear.
“Oh, shit,” she breathed. Apparently, she wasn’t the only one using human shields that night. The son of a bitch who’d brought a bomb to the party was surrounded by innocent victims.
“Behold the power of the One True Master!”the bomber yelled, his voice echoing in the eerie silence.
Shit, shit, shit . . .
“Get me outta here,” Hale whimpered.
“Shut up,” Maddie spat with a disgusted glance. She then sent a pointed look toward Jack. “We gotta go, Jack.”
“Tremble at his vengeance!”
“No one has a clear shot,” Jack muttered, his gaze darting toward the various SWAT officers and their hostage negotiator. “They’re all going to die. He’s going to detonate.”
Maddie laid a hand on his arm. “We can’t help them, Jack. We have to deal with Hale and Claire. Let the locals handle this one.”
“Behold his righteous glory!”
But Jack was still searching for an opening, some way to neutralize the situation.
“Jack,” she said in an urgent whisper. “You don’t know what kind of detonator the guy has. You shoot him, the bomb could go.”
He cursed, knowing she was right, and sent a tortured look her way. Maddie could hear the negotiator, trying to reason with the bomber. But there was no reasoning with a fanatic intent on becoming a martyr and taking out half a city block with him.
“I offer up my soul, Master! I give my all to you!”
“Jack!” Maddie cried.
This time, he turned on his heel, shoving Maddie and Hale ahead of him, racing toward the exit at the end of the hall. They’d just cleared the glass doors when Maddie heard a deafening roar, felt the ground tremble, heard glass shatter. The concussion from the blast threw them forward, the heat at her back searing her skin. She landed hard, sliding across the pavement for a few feet before rolling over with a groan.
She couldn’t hear anything except the muffled sounds of first responders rushing toward the site of the explosion. Thank God the blast seemed to have been largely contained within the hotel, but as Maddie surveyed the scene, she saw dazed and bloodied people wandering the street, injured by flying debris.
She glanced around frantically for Jack and saw him already on his feet, hurrying toward her. Then her gaze lighted on Hale, who lay on his stomach near the curb, unmoving. She managed to crawl over to him and rolled him over to reveal a huge gash across his forehead, white bone poking through. He must’ve nailed his head on the edge of the sidewalk when they’d been knocked off their feet, cracking his skull.
“Damn it!” she spat as Jack reached her side and dropped down to check Hale’s neck for a pulse.
Apparently finding none, Jack wiped his forehead with his forearm and sank back on his heels for a moment before rising to his feet and extending a hand to Maddie to help her up.
She stood but hesitated before taking a step, searching for a path that wasn’t covered with shards of glass. Jack glanced down at her bare feet and without missing a beat, swept her up into his arms, carrying her away from the devastated hotel toward the police barricades, where dozens of bystanders looked on in startled disbelief. One of the faces in the crowd was familiar—a lovely woman with blond hair and crystalline blue eyes.
The woman shoved through the onlookers, meeting up with them as Jack cleared the crowd.
